Hillary Clinton and State Dept. to Celebrate War Criminal Henry Kissinger, While the White House Repeats His Deadly Mistakes

Nothing more symbolizes how the temptations of power can corrupt youthful values and idealism than Secretary Hillary Clinton's invitation to Henry Kissinger and Richard Holbrooke to keynote a major State Department conference on the history of the Indochina war. As an idealistic college student, Clinton protested Kissinger's mass murder of civilians in Indochina. She knows full well that had the international laws protecting civilians in war been applied to Kissinger's bombing of civilian targets in Indochina he would have been indicted for crimes of war.

But on Sept. 29 she will introduce Kissinger at the State Department Historian's conference, giving him a platform to continue 40 years of Orwellian deception in which he has sought to blame Congress for the fall of Indochina rather than accepting responsibility for his massive miscalculations and indifference to human suffering.

Clinton has also invited Richard Holbrooke, who as State Department head of Afghanistan/Pakistan policy has learned nothing from history and is repeating precisely the same policies that caused the U.S. to lose in Indochina -- support of a corrupt and unpopular regime that cannot stand on its own. Inviting Holbrooke is particularly egregious, because following Obama's strategy review, according to Bob Woodward's new book, "perhaps the most pessimistic view came from Richard Holbrooke. "It can't work," he said. Lacking even a fraction of the integrity and moral courage of a Daniel Ellsberg, Holbrooke continues to promote in public a policy he privately believes is doomed to fail.

Inviting Kissinger to keynote a conference on U.S. history in Indochina insults history, the memories of tens of thousands of Americans and countless Indochinese civilians who needlessly died as a result of his policies, the young people of America who desperately need to learn the truth about what occurred in Indochina so as not to repeat it, and all those who oppose indiscriminate mass murder of civilians.

Giving Kissinger and Holbrooke a platform also has important policy implications for the present.

An attempt is currently being made to build support for today's war-making in Afghanistan and Pakistan by claiming that the U.S. lost in Indochina because Congress cut aid to Thieu. This view is being articulated not only by Kissinger and other Nixon-era officials but a younger cadre of military officers, most notably Lt. Colonel Louis Sorley in his book A Better War -- which has been, according to the Wall Street Journal, "recommended in multiple lists put out by military officers, including a former U.S. commander in Afghanistan, who passed it out to his subordinates."

As President Obama was considering Afghan policy last fall, Newsweek reported that "Louis Sorley's book argues ... that the military was stabbed in the back by its civilian leaders ... the United States could have won in Vietnam if only the U.S. Congress hadn't cut off military aid to South Vietnam. The most surprising guidance Vietnam may have to offer (to Afghanistan) is not that wars of this kind are unwinnable but that they can produce victories if presidents resist the temptation to fight wars halfway or on the cheap."

Sorley's contention is absurd. The evidence is overwhelming that the Thieu regime lost to its enemies because it was a corrupt and unpopular police-state, and its troops were far less motivated to fight than those of the other side. U.S. military aid to Saigon in 1974-'75 was two to four times as great as Soviet and Chinese aid to the North Vietnamese, and the Thieu army was well supplied with ammunition and fuel up to the very end.

Kissinger's mistake in Vietnam, like the Obama/Petraeus policy in Afghanistan today, was to try and prop up an unpopular and corrupt government that could not stand on its own. It is not Congress but Kissinger and Presidents Ford and Nixon who bear the responsibility for the fall of Saigon.